ConnectX-5 EN supports two ports of 100Gb Ethernet connectivity, while delivering low sub-600ns latency, extremely high message rates, PCIe switch and NVMe over Fabric offloads. ConnectX-5 providing high performance and flexible solution for the most demanding applications and markets: Machine Learning, Data Analytics, and more.
HPC environments
ConnectX-5 delivers high bandwidth, low latency, and high computation efficiency for high performance, data intensive and scalable compute and storage platforms. ConnectX-5 offers enhancements to HPC infrastructures by providing MPI and SHMEM/PGAS and Rendezvous Tag Matching offload, hardware support for out-of-order RDMA Write and Read operations, as well as additional Network Atomic and PCIe Atomic operations support.
Storage environments
NVMe storage devices are gaining popularity, offering very fast storage access. The evolving NVMe over Fabric (NVMe-oF) protocol leverages the RDMA connectivity for remote access. ConnectX-5 offers further enhancements by providing NVMe-oF target offloads, enabling very efficient NVMe storage access with no CPU intervention, and thus improved performance and lower latency.
Cloud and Web2.0 environments
Cloud and Web2.0 customers that are developing their platforms on Software Defined Network (SDN) environments are leveraging their servers' Operating System Virtual-Switching capabilities to enable maximum flexibility. Open V-Switch (OVS) is an example of a virtual switch that allows Virtual Machines to communicate with each other and with the outside world. A virtual switch traditionally resides in the hypervisor and switching is based on twelve-tuple matching on flows. The virtual switch or virtual router software-based solution is CPU intensive, affecting system performance and preventing fully utilizing available bandwidth.
Host management
Mellanox host management and control capabilities include NC-SI over MCTP over SMBus, and MCTP over PCIe - Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) interface, as well as PLDM for Monitor and Control DSP0248 and PLDM for Firmware Update DSP0267.
